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46November 2014
CULTURE
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November 2014 47
H
ERE is another cliché for upwardly
mobile Irish writers: struggling, but
not to the point of discomfort, in your
career as civil servant, journalist or what-
ever, you get a foothold through publication
in a second-rate Irish journal or newspaper,
make a few literary friends, and eventually
get a publisher for your book about homo-
sexuality in Wexford, the rebellion,
family breakdown or whatever.
You embrace a right-on, left-liberal, anti-
Church/Civil-War-Party attitude in politics.
You get favourably reviewed in the Irish
press for your shiny modern politics and
avoid analysis of your plot or especially
your prose; somehow an Ireland-friendly
writer picks you up for favourable review
in the Ireland-friendly Guardian; marhal-
ling all this your agent gets you reviewed by
a usual suspect Irish author in the New York
press or academic journals.
And suddenly you’ve won the Man Booker/
Impac or American National Book award.
France has made you a Chevalier des Arts
et Lettres. Although you write in English at
least you’re not American or English, they
think, and actually that’s the only reason
you’re there.
But back in Ireland they’re speaking of
you in the same sentences as Yeats. Joyce
and Beckett. Though really you’re more
Maeve Binchy.
And you’ve never had to stop off to real-
ise just how contrived the conveyor belt
that took you to a forgettable international
celebrity was. With the baubly imprimaturs
over your desk, in your free time you can
work on your jowls, a literary residency and
churning out over-generous reviews of the
works of those who got you where you are,
and their predictable successors.
Fintan O’Toole, Colm Tóibín, Roy Foster,
Diarmaid Ferriter, Joseph O’Connor are
princes at Ireland’s tentacular literary
court.
Elevated, mostly peripatetic eminences,
they reach to the national consciousness,
the national conscience, and beyond.
The Irish Times is the arch facilitator of
an unsavoury epochal orgy of niceness and
respect for and among these personages.
O’Toole as Literary Editor at the Irish
Times is the brain of the great revision-
ist octopus– in succession to John Banville
whose role was indistinguishable. Outliers
good for some fraternal (funny that) lauda-
tion are Roddy Doyle, Colum McCann, Frank
McCourt, Joe Lee and Terry Eagleton. The
last four are gratifyingly offshore and open
easy ‘entrées’ for international pick-up.
The Irish Times will adulate as marvel-
lous, wonderful and masterful (always,
masterful) the literary fruits of these his-
torico-literal buddies even if they turned
out books on travel, cookery or gardening.
The prose in the reviews rarely scintillates
or elevates.
The jalopy for the boosterism is ‘review-
as-blurb’. Superlative-dripping blurbs are
product placements for intellectuals with
quiescent publishing houses the more mer-
cenary beneficiaries.
There is of course an ideo-
logical underpinning to the
brotherhood. You must have
adopted the idea that (per
Ferriter in , O’Connor
when on the radio, and O’Toole
passim) the state is not just
economically but…morally
bankrupt. You must invest the
sentiment every time you lead it
out with a sense that this is an
original epiphany.
You will like Europe and be
sceptical though certainly au
fait with the United States.
Antipathy to England (or indeed
the English) is out. You, dear
reader, if you want to rise to a
new literary station can play the game at
home, on your typewriter.
Roy Foster is perhaps the most coruscat-
ingly tribal (or more properly anti-tribal) of
the cabal. Professor Foster effects a repres-
sive historical revisionism in particular.
So Brendan Bradshaw, Director of History
Studies at Cambridge, for example accuses
him of a “natural anti-Irish bias”.
Amplifying suspicions that Foster ele-
vates ‘the Ascendancy mind’ over that of the
common or garden Celt, in ‘Modern Ireland
-’, the Young Ireland Movement
as defined by him had “an insurrection-
ary ethic founded in an almost psychotic
Anglophobia”. And for Foster the revolu-
tionaries of are rebels with “atavistic
Anglophobia” (as opposed to the “atavistic
Anglophilia” of others). Ramming it home,
he castigates the Irish as part of “a competi-
tive victimhood in the history of colonised
nations”. This is wilfully cruel.
Foster’s history is best digested in Oxford
with tea and cake as the punts flow past with
their enviable youthful cargos.
None of the gang looks into the unrecon-
structed Irish soul with much sympathy.
Tóibín has written sympathetically of
Banville’s novel ‘Birchwood’: “Here,
Irish history was an enormous joke, a
baroque narrative full of crack-pot land-
lords and roaming peasants and an abiding
sense of menace and decay”.Tóibín (who
co-wrote ‘The Irish Famine’ with Ferriter)
shares Foster’s magnificently patronis-
ing revisionism on the Famine and the
revolutionary tradition. For exam-
ple, as Foster sees it, during the Famine
landlordism was “seen as to blame for
the catastrophe by many – illogically, but
understandably”.
If you ever subvert anyone else in the
fraternity you risk banishment (the
Weekend Review in the Irish
Independent?) and there is also
as with any gang a need to keep
other boys out. John Waters is
of course not in; nor is Tim Pat
Coogan. Desmond Fennell: out.
A particular antipathy envelops
Seamus Deane (famous Seamus
was of course the revered
preference).
Poor Fiach MacConghail,
Director of the Abbey Theatre
was outmanoeuvred by a lethal
axis of Foster who took part in a
review of the oeuvre of the thea-
tre teeing up a sniffy O’Toole to
report it and castigate the vacu-
ous standards there, in the Irish
Times.
Sinn Féin and Fianna Fáil are nasties. The
Catholic Church monstrous. Protestantism
is OK, Labour is better, the Irish Times
ideal.
Whether history will be kind to this exclu-
sionary perspective is another matter.
Though largely genteel they are not
beyond occasional deterrent salvos of
street-fighting. So Diarmaid Ferriter lashed
out at fellow De Valera biographers, Tim Pat
Coogan and Anthony Jordan when his own
pictorial book ‘Judging Dev’ was questioned
by them: “Mr Coogan wrote two critical
reviews of the ‘Judging Dev’ book which, in
my view, were fuelled by his personal antip-
athy to de Valera and because my book dared
to challenge the conclusions of his own
The backslapping
of the
Irish Times
revisionist literary
fraternity is smug
and provincial.
By Kevin Kiely
O’Toole as
Literary
Editor at the
Irish Times
is the brain
of the great
revisionist
octopus
“
48November 2014
biography of de Valera. Mr Jordan, as he
states in his letter, offered his own biogra-
phy of William Cosgrave to the Department
of Education for distribution to schools and
he is annoyed it was rejected”. Jordan had
exposed the commercial vested interest of
RTÉ as co-publisher giving much favourable
exposure to ‘Judging Dev’ and the advan-
tage afforded it by the decision of Education
Minister Mary Hanafin to ensure every
school in the country bought it. Another
atavistic (that word again) DeValerian Ryan
Tubridy, inevitably and quite irrelevantly,
pronounced it “a watershed in the telling of
Irish history”. Coogan had been irritated
when this was pointed out after he had par-
ticipated in an RTÉ programme on the book,
ignorant of the connection.
But here I want to look beyond their reach
to the mere national conscience, to their
reach to each other. It is useful sometimes
to follow the thread to its end. So Tóibín
praised O’Connor’s ‘Ghost Light’ an his-
torical fiction, the favoured metier of this
duo. It had “an astonishing command of
voice, using tones that are both tender and
powerfully emotional, with a brilliant com-
mand of the period”. Reciprocally O’Connor
cited a “masterful” touch from Tóibín’s ‘The
Master’, a bowdlerised history of the novel-
ist, Henry James, who awakens from a dream
“like an old door’”. The style!
O’Connor gushed over Tóibín’s ‘The
Testament of Mary’ even to the
point of surely underestimat-
ing his own hyperbole. “I cannot
praise this book highly enough;
the voice of Mary is so clear”.
Tóibín upped the stakes to praise
O’Connor’s story collection ‘The
Thrill of It All’ as “playful but
also at times sorrowful; it allows
in great quantities of life”. For
Roddy Doyle O’Connor’s ‘The Star
of the Sea’ is very, very [yes two
verys] clever”. This for the ‘nov-
elist’ who grounded the literary
tomahawk that was ‘Cowboys and
Indians’.
The pulsing heart of the pack is
Tóibín and O’Toole who manage to spend
regular sabatticals in the States and who
recently did an ‘in conversation’ love-in in
up-state New York (Tóibín’s also done one
with Foster, in Manchester). Both are back-
grounded in current-affairs journalism
– they both edited ‘Magill’, and there is no
recorded instance of them disagreeing on
anything. Of course it is officially impolite to
disagree with Tóibín on anything anyway.
O’Connor is often afforded a political pass
(because of his literariness?). So much of
last year ‘Drivetime with Mary Wilson’ on
RTÉ’s Radio was laden with the monolo-
gous – never less than fashionably liberal
– thoughts of the oleaginously smug history
author.
After Fintan O’Toole recently got Colm
Tóibín to review – rapturously – ‘Ireland in
the s’ by Diarmaid Ferriter, Ferriter
bestowed on O’Toole’s own book ‘Up the
Republic’, a review of impressive generos-
ity in the Irish Times in September .
Tantalisingly, the review may
have been commissioned
by the paper’s books editor,
Fintan O’Toole. Or perhaps the
Irish Times, like Arthur Cox,
operates Chinese walls in these
important matters.
There was also an actual
extract of Ferriter’s book in
the Irish Times, before all
this, in which he just happened
to praise two of the emerging
intellectual writers of the edgy
s – Fintan O’Toole and
Colm Tóibín. But as O’Toole
has so definitively put it “for
anyone tempted by the sin of
nostalgia, Ferriter’s superbly researched
narrative is a powerful prophylactic”.
In , O’Toole reviewed ‘Occasions of
Sin’ by Diarmaid Ferriter, though he had also
launched it, in UCD. He was kind: “A ground-
breaking analysis of sex in Ireland lays bare
the devastating consequences of more than a
century of oppression”. The book then used
O’Toole for some blurbing. [The] superbly
researched narrative is a powerful prophy-
lactic [to nostalgia]”.
O’Toole, writing in the Irish Times said
‘The Irish Story’ [hammily head-titled ‘Luck
and the Irish’] was “brilliantly scathing ...
and immensely enjoyable”.
In the same vein both ‘The Irish Story’
and ‘Modern Ireland -’, accord-
ing to Tóibín in the London Review of Books
(in ), rank Foster as “certainly the most
brilliant and courageous Irish historian of
his generation”. As one master on another he
has written (without citation) that ‘Modern
Ireland’ would be “declared a masterwork by
most historians who reviewed it”.
Roy Foster considered Ferriter’s ‘The
Transformation of Ireland -’ “
judicious and empathetic ... a rich and pro-
vocative study. This will be an influential
book, and is a remarkable achievement”.
Tóibín then puffed it (for its front cover) as
“a landmark book” while on the back cover
there is space for an extended fawn: “a timely
and masterful new survey … a transforma-
tion in historical methodology”. Tóibín’s
sycophancy was sufficiently alluring that
Profile Books re-used this block-quote on
Ferriter’s book on Ireland in the s,
‘Ambiguous Republic’. A conveyor belt of
laudation.
The gang effect a rarefied disdain for polit-
ical nepotism and an exquisite taste in social
integrity.
Readers, though not of the Irish Times,
will make up their own minds whether these
standards are maintained in their own
workaday lives as critics.
These few who rarify our national intel-
lect might just consider that their shared
appreciations appear to outsiders as not
just cowardly and bad, but in language that
they will understand and which will cut, as
provincial. •
masters
CULTURE IRISH TIMES
You must have
adopted the
idea that the
state is not just
economically
but…morally
bankrupt
“
